Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, in a conference call after the deal announcement, said it will remain committed to its hardware partners.

“Before last fall, HTC was definitely the best Windows phone maker, because they have been working with Microsoft for many, many years,” Yuanta Securities’ analyst Dennis Chan said. “But in this past year, Nokia is increasingly dominating the Windows phone category.”

An HTC spokeswoman declined to comment on the Microsoft-Nokia deal, saying that the company was assessing the situation.

The Nokia deal also brings up the specter of whether HTC could become a takeover target, a possibility that brokerages have been increasingly circulating in recent months.

However, analysts say that at least for now, there seems to be no interest from Cher Wang, HTC’s chairwoman and major stockholder, to sell the company.

Meanwhile, HTC is also trying to return to business-as-usual after its design vice president Thomas Chien and several other research & development staff were arrested over the weekend on suspicions of leaking company secrets.

HTC Chief Executive Peter Chou made an effort to rally the troops this week, emailing employees to band together and do “the right things for our business.” The email, obtained by the Wall Street Journal, was confirmed by HTC.

“The misbehavior of some staff does not reflect the values of our organization,” Mr. Chou wrote. “We remain focused on our innovation spirit and will continue to provide world class designs and products. We will learn from this incident and take it as an opportunity to improve on our organization practices, processes and leadership.”

Mr. Chou reiterated that the design team had “sufficient resources” and that the arrests would not impact the company’s operations.